OVER the past two decades a strange phenomenon has become clear in much of the center of the United States: people have almost stopped having children. Several factors may explain this. Much of the Baby Boom generation has finished having children, and its successors, known unimaginatively as Generation X, have delayed having children and chosen to have much smaller families. These facts, which apply to the country as a whole, acquire ominous dimensions when considered alongside the "rural flight" away from the Midwest which began in the 1930s and continues today. The problem is far from just local: the area suffering from this reverse baby boom comprises 279 counties in six states, totaling nearly 470,000 square miles. Included are Wyoming and Montana, most of North and South Dakota, three fourths of Nebraska, and more than half of Kansas. In the past ten years 16 percent of the lower forty-eight states has seen barely one percent of the nation's births.

The region is already underpopulated. As a whole, the 279 counties average only six people per square mile, according to the 1990 census. Even this average would be lower were it not for a few comparatively populous places, such as Hall County, Nebraska, which is served by an interstate highway and is thus a center of trade; in 1990 it had ninety-one people per square mile. In that census half the counties had fewer than four people per square mile and nineteen counties had fewer than one. In contrast, New Jersey has nearly 1,100, and three New England states taken together average more than 750. This area can ill afford the economic and social consequences of a lost generation of unborn children. When it comes time to pass the torch to the next generation, too few hands will be waiting.

After the end of the Second World War the Baby Boom began: in 1946, 3.4 million births were recorded in the United States. The annual total climbed, and from 1954 through 1964 births averaged 4.2 million. Then, during the next dozen years, births declined nationally. The low period was 1973 through 1976, when they barely exceeded 3.1 million a year. The national decline was only temporary, however: by 1977 the number of births began to rise, and in 1989 it again exceeded 4 million. Births remained above 4 million through 1993, and the Census Bureau projects that they will remain at about 3.9 million through 2005.

But in the six-state region the situation has been different. Even the Baby Boom was not as pronounced here; it peaked earlier and the subsequent decline was greater. The region in fact experienced a "baby bust" for nearly fifteen years, from about 1965 through the late 1970s. Nationally births declined 27 percent, from the peak of 4.3 million in 1957 to a low of just over 3.1 million in 1973. But, taking each state's peak and low years from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, in Nebraska births declined 34 percent, in Kansas 40 percent, in South Dakota 42 percent, and in North Dakota 44 percent.

An upswing in the region mirroring that in the country as a whole has failed to occur. Births in these counties rose slightly from about 1979 through 1984 -- a period known locally as the "Baby Boom echo," resulting from the original Baby Boomers' reaching their peak childbearing years. In reality the rise was barely a blip. In North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska not a single year of this "echo" saw as many births as even the slowest year of the Baby Boom.

By 1985 births had begun to fall throughout the region, and the decline has accelerated since 1990. It has been greatest in rural areas, with the 98th Meridian serving as an approximate dividing line. The portions of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas west of this line have experienced an unprecedented "child drought" during the past ten years, and the birth rate for the past five years amounts to a child famine.

Consider Loup County, in central Nebraska, whose residents gave birth to twenty-two to twenty-nine children each year for fifteen consecutive years during the Baby Boom. In 1995, one child was born. Similarly, the residents of Hayes County, Nebraska, had up to seventy-two births a year during the Baby Boom. In 1995, five children were born to the county's residents. In 1951, 185 children were born to residents of Hitchcock County, Nebraska; in 1995, twenty-six children were born. And these counties are not isolated examples. During the first ten years of the Baby Boom the residents of the fifty-nine Nebraska counties west (or mostly west) of the 98th Meridian averaged more than 12,000 births a year. In 1994 and 1995 births to residents of those counties, which cover more than 58,000 square miles, totaled fewer than 6,000 a year.

This dismal picture has very few exceptions. Three or four of Nebraska's rural counties have bucked the trend, thanks to the interstate highway system, which has helped connect them to more-populated areas, and thus has slowed rural flight. Births to residents of those counties have stabilized at 10 to 30 percent below prior levels. But the highway makes very little difference to most of the counties in the western half of the state, which remain isolated and underpopulated. And Nebraska has not even had the greatest declines in this six-state region.

Births in North and South Dakota fell still further. In much of North Dakota the declines are apocalyptic: From 1947 through 1956 annual births averaged more than 17,000, but in 1995 they totaled only 8,479 -- a decline by half. Births to residents of twenty-eight of the state's fifty-three counties declined by more than three quarters, and in only seven counties did they decline by less than half. In 1995 births in South Dakota totaled fewer than 10,500 -- fewer than in any year of the Depression.

The situation in Wyoming is nearly as bad. With more than 97,000 square miles, Wyoming invariably produces fewer children a year than Washington D.C., which has only sixty-one square miles. Montana is also suffering a drought of children.

Kansas, the most populous of the six states, has experienced some of the greatest declines. Consider, for example, Russell County, the home of Bob Dole. What has happened to Russell County, smack-dab in the middle of Kansas, is typical of dozens of counties. During the five-year period from 1949 to 1953 Russell County saw an average of 356 births a year. From 1991 to 1995 annual births have averaged only seventy-four -- a decline of more than 79 percent. Russell County is not a throwaway, back-roads, dead-end place with no history and no hope. What happens to Russell County, and other counties, matters -- both to Kansas and to the social fabric of the whole country. With only seventy-four children born a year, Russell County will be hard put to hold on to the gains of the past century. It's as if much of the great central breadbasket of North America had been ordered to downsize and rid itself of more than half its work force and social structure during the next thirty years.

BELYING any sense of crisis, most towns in this region seem prosperous. This is true because much of the population is still in its prime: the oldest Baby Boomers turned fifty last year, and a majority of the cohort is thirty-five to forty-nine years old. They may be finished or nearly finished having children, but that hardly means they have one foot in the grave. The problem is that the next generation is not being sown: in 2025 who will do the reaping? And will there be anything left to reap?

With fewer children, schools will be closed and consolidated. As the population drops, the Postal Service will close post offices. Government at all levels will reduce staff. Elks Clubs and American Legion posts will close, as will movie theaters and barber shops. Churches with dwindling memberships will be unable to support a pastor. In many towns the clinic or hospital will close, owing to a lack of patients and an inability to retain doctors. The effects of reduced economic input will ripple through the local economy -- particularly in rural areas, where people depend on one another. As the cutbacks continue, the value of real estate will plummet. Adding to the problem, in fifteen years Baby Boomers will begin to retire. Many will move to Omaha, Wichita, Denver, or even Texas. WOOFs (well-off older folks) will seek easier climes, and houses in many small towns will go begging. A similar fate awaits commercial property.

The colleges throughout the region will also suffer from declining birth rates. College and university enrollments will be high over the short term, because of the comparatively large number of children born during the "echo" years. In recent decades college towns have been insulated from the ebb and flow of the economy. By 2010, however, enrollments will decline substantially.

Without doubt the decline in births will gradually drain the life out of the region. Children are the key to holding society together. Any village, town, county, culture, or other social unit is just one generation from extinction. Without more children, the aging social fabric will fray and finally fall apart.

Economists and sociologists teach that there are critical masses -- minimum numbers below which essential "synergisms" break down. These synergisms build and sustain communities. A community built on a hundred births a year cannot remain cemented if births drop (and stay) below fifty a year. The areas in which births have declined by more than half are destined to undergo profound changes within a generation. For some communities the changes will begin within a decade.

Fighting the decline may be like opposing old age: the fight may be unwinnable in any case. Decades of attempts to attract new residents, by competing for industry, agricultural development, tourism, and access to large highways, have, with a few exceptions, been unsuccessful. It may be best just to get out of Dodge while the getting is good. If Russell, Kansas, and hundreds of similar communities are going to turn into ghost towns within thirty to fifty years, perhaps the wisest choice is simply to pack up now. In the years ahead some communities will struggle valiantly against uncertain odds; many others will die with barely a whimper.

The Great Plains were the land of opportunity, the home of legions of pilgrims and seekers. These brave souls were the heroes of O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! They lived in conditions we would consider unthinkable, suffering years and even generations of hardship, deprivation, and poverty, often working themselves to death. Progress was at first glacial; the drought of the 1890s ruined thousands. But the survivors toiled on, unwilling to admit the possibility of defeat. And over the past hundred years some of the nation's strongest families and finest communities have resulted from that toil.

No one can pretend that the lack of children is not critical. The present decline in births condemns the future: any kind of economic development relies on a number of children sufficient to fill the next generation. If anything can help the future of these 279 counties, it is the decision by Baby Boomers and their children to have another baby.

Most Popular

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.